If you’re a youth pastor or student ministry leader, one critical task you hold is planning and choosing teaching topics throughout the year. Chances are good that from time to time you wonder, “How will we address the ‘faith and science’ conversation with our students this year?” For most of us, this isn’t an easy question to answer!

You’ve seen it in the Instagram pics of the girl in your youth group with a swarm of dark-skinned children around her. These photos can provoke a mixture of reactions within us. On the one hand, they feel so helplessly cliché, like mission trips are nothing more than a rite of passage for white kids, passing off a long “savior” tradition to a new generation.

But on the other hand, there’s something about these experiences that feels so right that we struggle to write them off entirely. There’s something about those photos that feels like God’s kingdom come. It’s like our mission trip photos are icons of heaven—of God’s future breaking into the present.